ASSESSING THE LISTENING SKILL OF ENGLISH - IMMERSION  STUDENTS

Olajumoke Elizabeth Ajala; Gbenga Abel Fakuade

Olajumoke Elizabeth Ajala Department of Foreign Languages, Uskudar University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3841-9670
Gbenga Abel Fakuade Department of Lingistics and Nigerian Languages, University of Ilorin, Nigeria.

Keywords: Listening Skill, English, Immersion program, Assessment, Acquisition

Abstract

In the purpose to enhance English proficiency, students from diverse neighboring West African Francophone countries enrolled in a year English immersion programme at the Linguistics Immersion Centre (LIC), University of Ilorin, Nigeria. The aim of the study was to examine the performance of the listening skill of the LIC students from the entry to the exit points of the immersion programme in a pre-test, intermediate and post-test respectively. The specific objectives were to: (i) generate listening scores of the LIC students at the 3 levels of tests; (iii) ascertain the difference in means of listening scores between the 3 levels of test; and (iv) determine whether there was a significant difference in means of listening scores between levels of tests. This is a qualitative and quantitative study which used Triangulation method, and adopted the Bottom-up and Cognitive theories of listening. The findings of the study were: (i) learning outcomes cannot be generalized as each individual student has a learning style; (ii) the performance of the LIC students at the 3 levels of listening tests were inconsistent and not dependent on the length nor the accent of the speakers in the audio listening tests; and (iii) there was no significant difference in the means of listening scores between the levels of tests since the calculated sig. value 0.167 was greater than 0.05 alpha level (0.167>0.05). The study concluded that the inconsistencies in the students’ performance cannot be attributed to time, nor accent from audio tapes but personality factors in learning.

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